Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

ISBN: 0593656318

Author: Gilbert, Sophie

Condition: New

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book Named one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME, NPR, Elle, and The Boston GlobeSearing rigorously researched but never stuffy Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies. -The New York TimesSo clear-eyed that its startling." -The Washington PostEntertaining and even energizing, transforming a dismal history into something like a rallying cry. -The Boston GlobeFrom Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop cultureWhat happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movements power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and riot grrrl feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who werent. Gilbert tracks many of the periods dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the cultures reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.